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Mahou Shoujo Shinto Scion
Episode Four:
“Trinity”
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Her father’s hushed phone call once she - and Yatagarasu - had explained what had happened had summoned a dark, discreet sedan with government license plates and a rather less discreet escort of Tokyo Metropolitan Police squad cars and Self Defense Force jeeps rigged with armor plating and machine guns on top. A very polite driver had held the door for them, and then the entire convoy set off through the streets of Tokyo with a giant crow fluttering overhead and Yoko and her father seated on either side of the rear bench seat.
Eventually, she broke the tense silence and asked, “Did you know who Mom was - is - Daddy?”
Satou Reiji sighed and said, “She never told me, and I never challenged her on it, but... Yes.”
“So I didn’t get to know
that, either,” she said bitterly. “Just like I don’t get to know if she has any hobbies or if she could cook or what she liked for dinner or even if she’d be proud of me or not!”
“Yoko, this isn’t-”
“Isn’t the time? Just like it’s
never been the time to know
anything, no matter how trivial?” She glared, years worth of words finally tumbling out. “There’s a hell of a lot of difference between keeping ‘Oh, hey, you’re a
demigoddes’ under your hat and making
half of everything I
am into a total blank spot!”
Reiji held up on hand, a wordless ‘stop’ signal he’d used before, and put a lash of command into his voice. “Yoko!”
“No, Daddy,” she told him grimly. “I’ve put up with this for as long as I can remember, cried myself to sleep every birthday and special night we’ve ever
had, and now there’s something
this incredible being dropped on top of me? You’re not getting out of this just because you’re my father. I’m not a little girl you can just order or put off any more.”
Her father stared at her like he’d never seen her before, then leaned back in his seat with a sad sigh. “The most wide-ranging type of Finding is a spell that locates particular thoughts,” he said. “It requires knowing the particular phrase or belief you seek, and too much power for any mortal mage to use more than once or twice in a lifetime, but for a god who knew your mother, all they would have had to do would be seek a mind that connected any of those things you’d otherwise have known with the idea of ‘my mother’... and they’d have found you.”
“Me and however many thousands of other girls,” Yoko said.
“I knew it bothered you. But not that much.”
When Reiji opened his eyes at the long pause that followed that statement, he found himself being glared at through slitted golden eyes. “How do you know about things like search spells anyway?” his daughter asked.
Reiji looked back at her for a long moment, then sighed quietly. “Before you were born, I was an agent of the Exorcism Division.”
“What,” she asked sharply, “like Spirit Crime Investigations, a cop ‘busting demons for the Emperor’?”
He chuckled. “Not so dramatically, and not so neatly, but yes.”
Barely - just barely, by remembering all the times that he’d picked her up after she skinned her knee, the happy days he’d taken her to a park after he got off work, all the warm moments of a loving childhood - Yoko kept herself from asking if he’d
meant for her to get herself killed out of sheer ignorance.
She looked out the window and didn’t say anything more, and both of them spent the rest of the ride thinking silently.
* * * * * * *
Tsukusa wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find in the private office of the Prime Minister of Japan, but it wasn’t a snake, a raven, and two girls her own age. The PM herself, sure, in all her porn-star-playing-a-politician glory, and the wiry guy in the cheap suit with the nothing-to-prove stone badass’s eyes wasn’t out of the range of the possible, but the menagerie and the chick and the amazon with the funny colored eyes were surprises.
Then the relay clicked. She herself was carrying a rabbit, after all. And a snake and a
crow would mean...
Always be daring. “Yo,” she said, waving the hand that wasn’t full of bunny. “Take it you’re the cousins? Suzuki Tsukusa, nice ta meetcha.”
“Satou Yoko, please treat me kindly,” the shorter of the two stunners said, bowing from her seat. She had a sweet, pure voice, completely unlike Tsukusa’s own faint rasp, curves going in and out in exactly the right places, and looked to be caught between a serious mad on and being even more nervous than Tsukusa herself felt.
“Tanaka Izuna,” the tall one said, slightly amused and perfectly comfortable - as she should be, since, unless Tsukusa was remembering her face from somewhere completely different, they were in her own mother’s office.
Her voice, under the la-de-da diction, was low, dark, and rich, like molten chocolate, and nobody shorter could’ve pulled off that figure without looking like a caricature.
“Welcome,” Izuna’s mom said, putting an edge on the word that snapped Tsukusa’s eyes over to her face and convinced the hairs on the back of her neck that she did not
ever want to be in serious trouble with her. “I apologise for starting before you could arrive, Suzuki-kun, but there were several things I needed to discuss with Satou-san.”
Tsukusa glanced at Yoko, then realized that the other adult must be her father. There was a slight resemblance.
“The political details aren’t relevant,” Tanaka said, “But in practice the three of you have been recruited to be part of the special detachment the National Police are creating to deal with Izanami’s attacks.”
“Like the Tokyo Police keep for shooting up terrorists and busting down doors,” Tsukusa said, firmly ignoring the voice of sensible caution that said that being a smart alec with
this lady might not be the best idea. Fortunately, the Prime Minister looked amused.
“For the undead rather than extremist groups, yes. The Imperial Household Agency’s Exorcism Division advises me that they estimate another month at the current rate of attacks before they are no longer able to support the Police and Self-Defense Force to any useful degree. Until that time, your task will be to learn to replace them.”
“But...” Yoko said, frowning in confusion, “If
they’re having trouble, and we didn’t - much - then why...?”
“Collateral damage,” the younger Tanaka said. “I’m pretty sure that all three of us can make quite a mess if we’re not careful.”
“Um...” the golden-eyed girl said, looking a bit embarrassed and a bit alarmed.
“Never been in a fight?” Tsukusa asked, deciding that the tall girl’s rueful tone meant she hadn’t been taking a swipe of some sort at her.
“Not really, no.”
“Not that complicated,” Tsukusa assured her. “Bust their chops before they bust yours.”
“At the most basic level, yeah,” the older Satou said, and Tsukusa could see the anger flare up again in his daughter’s expression. The kid was pissed at her old man, and for something recent. Smart money’d say she hadn’t had a clue about the whole ‘goddess’ deal any more than Tsukusa herself had. “The problem is, Izanami’s soldiers won’t play fairly any more than the JSDF or an assassin would. You’ll need to learn the tricks that will keep you alive anyway even when they
are expecting you.”
“And you wanna be sure we can take orders,” Tsukusa said.
“And we want to be certain you can take orders,” the Prime Minister agreed, “and that you can control your abilities well enough to damage only what you wish to harm - or, if that proves impossible, that you will refrain until the alternative becomes worse.”
“Hey, look,” Tsukusa said instinctively, “I didn’t wreck a goddamn
thing.”
“No,” the princess said, looking chagrined under the layer of ice-cube control, “but I did. Quite comprehensively.”
“Oh yeah? What’d you blow up?”
“Akihabara.”
“...All of it?” Satou said, looking guilty, like she was glad to be talking about somebody else’s screwup rather than her own. Tsukusa guessed that she’d done a number on wherever she was, too.
“Not quite all of it. Just the electronic parts.”
Given just how many toy and computer stores were crammed into that trendy shopping district, Tsukusa wasn’t sure just how much the cost of
those damages would run, but she knew it’d be in the tens of billions of yen.
“Daaaaaamn,” she said, impressed.
* * * * * * *
After that meeting, the three girls had been shuffled off into the care of a team of six doctors - four extremely distinguished looking older gentlemen, a massive, muscular fellow that looked more like a prize fighter in a labcoat, and a tubby, cheerful, somewhat younger one that had greeted Yoko by name. Since Izuna could recognize one of the ‘elder statesmen’ as her own doctor, it was easy to conclude that one of the other four knew Tsukusa and the other three were eminent specialists.
Somehow, she suspected that it was the scary one that had been serving as her ‘family doctor’.
Mentally, Izuna cataloged their attitudes; Yamada-sensei was more worried than she’d ever seen him, and Yoko’s doctor seemed to be of the same mind despite his good nature and efforts to be reassuring. The looming one - he could have given Izuna half a head, and that didn’t happen often - seemed completely unperturbed, asking and answering questions in concise, clipped sentences and completely ignoring the rest of the group’s occasional burst of speculation. The three specialists, though, were, to a man, polite, voluably helpful, and obviously fighting to restrain immense excitement.
A less reverent corner of her mind wondered if there had been any
literal blood on the floors in the research community for the privilege of being here.
After a long and unusually thorough period of blood pressure cuffs, stethoscopes, blood samples, swabs, and other familiar and non-objectionable examinations, the girls were each divided into small individual examination rooms.
“We don’t know what will be important to know to try and figure out what your abilities do, precisely,” Yamada-sensei began, “or what effects their activation might have on you. In order to-”
He was interrupted by Tsukusa, bellowing an outraged, “
WHAT?!” from the examination room next door.
She let the awkward silence go on for a moment, while her mind put the pieces together and conjured an image of Tsukusa sitting on an examination couch, eyes dark and hard through the furious blush chasing its way from her cheeks down her neck and shoulders to the deep, inviting depth of cleavage framed when her arm cradled those full breasts for what modesty she could achieve when-
Izuna shook her head sharply, banishing the image.
She’s your cousin
, remember that!
“You need us to strip, in case we share some kind of distinctive birthmark or something.”
“Or if your scars start regenerating or something of that nature,” Yamada-sensei agreed. “Thank you for understanding.”
Izuna got up to double-check and make certain the door was locked. “I won’t pretend I like the thought, but I have to concede the logic. You’ll want pictures, I imagine?”
“I’m afraid so.”
She sighed and started to slip out of her clothes. “At least it’s you,” she said.
Yamada-sensei had, after all, been the person she’d talked to to try and figure out why the girl she sat next to all through Junior High had been making her stomach feel all fluttery, who’d shown her that ‘The Closet’ was a survivable prison. Even if he
had had any interest in women, she’d still have trusted him.
When, after the examination, Yamada-sensei handed her a hospital gown and picked up the room’s phone, Izuna had a sudden sinking feeling.
The
roar of “
THE FUCK I AM!” from next door added a bit of deja vu to the worry.
“What now, Yamada-sensei?”
“Now,” he said, “I’m afraid that we need to ask you to let us record your transformation.”
“Naked.”
“Regrettably.”
Izuna spent several moments tamping her own temper down while Tsukusa’s voice, quiet enough to be blurred but still easily identifiable, ranted furiously, then sighed. “All right,” she said, “Let’s go, if they’re ready for us.”
* * * * * * *
Yoko sat in the waiting room with her two new cousins, killing time while the ‘dye’ the doctors had had them take propagated through their bodies. To distract herself from the urge to play with her own hair - it had gone from an ordinary black to
white, and she was pretty sure it would glow in the dark - she said, “So, um... what do you two do for fun?”
The scary one who’d shown up carrying the moon-rabbit stopped playing with her own stone-grey locks and gave Yoko a funny look. “Funny thing to ask at a time like this,” she said.
“Perhaps,” the PM’s daughter said, giving Yoko a reassuring smile. “But it broke the ice, didn’t it?”
“Guess it did,” Tsukusa said, then chuckled as Yoko leg go the breath she’d been holding. “Princess is used to havin’ bodyguards around, but you- shit, what’d I say?”
Izuna had gone stone white halfway through the tough girl’s sentence. “My detail... most of them... didn’t make it through the zombie attack where I...”
She trailed off, looking stricken.
“Shit,” Tsukusa said again. “I’m sorry.”
Yoko frowned. “Isn’t it strange that all three of us ended up needing to fight more or less
just as we found out about, well, who your fathers and my mother are? I mean, Yatagarasu showed up the morning before, for me, but compared to eighteen years, that’s still cutting it really close.”
“Mokumoku showed up a couple months ago, for me,” Tsukusa offered.
Izuna frowned, playing with some of her hair without any attention to the fact that it had turned light electric blue. “Kirara never said how he knew where I’d be,” she said, with a thoughtfulness that was ominous.
“Talk to the rabbit, first?” Tsukusa suggested after a moment.
“Because she did the best job tracking?” Yoko asked.
“Best odds on a straight answer,” was the reply. “The crow’s got that big-shot sorta smooth and the snake’s said flat-out he’s a hatchet man - if they’ve got agendas, they’ll hide ‘em rather than givin’ us what we want to know.”
“But,” Izuna said, continuing the thought and making a visible effort to shake off her grief, “Mokumoku is all but ready to start your personal cult.”
Tsukusa started to glare, then visibly decided to drop it. Yoko made a mental note to thank her for that - their tall cousin still looked kind of shaky, even if she was willing to start trying to make jokes.
More or less. The tiny moon-rabbit was definitely in
great awe of her master.
Yoko giggled as an image came to her mind.
The other two looked at her oddly, so she explained. “Picture her in little
miko’s robes, waving a
gohei and-”
Izuna laughed, and Tsukusa groaned and dropped her face comically into one palm.
Inwardly, Yoko smiled in satisfaction. Not only had the joke helped cheer Izuna out her sudden black mood, it had finished breaking the initial awkwardness. "Actually, she said thoughtfully, "we really will need to put that on our serious question list."
"What, you
want people goin' and worshippin' at your used underwear?" Tsukusa teased.
"Well, no," Yoko said, "but having an order of hunky priests dedicated to my every whim miiiight be worth putting up with it."
Both of them laughed, then Yoko said, "But seriously, I doubt any of the old cults were
just about the ego. If it's something that's no use
right now, that's one thing, but I bet we're gonna want to know... Daddy never talks about Mom much," her voice darkened momentarily as she said that, but she made herself brighten as she went on, "but I don't see him with anyone shallow enough to just want to be grovelled to."
"Sounded like Her Scariness told you more about your old man, Princess. What d'you think?" Tsukusa asked, but the tallest of the three was sitting with a Mona-Lisa smile on her face and a faint blush on her cheeks, and her eyes completely unfocused.
Yoko giggled. "I think she's still on the priests."
Izuna snapped out of her daze and glared icily for a moment. Tsukusa glared back, and Yoko's heart started to sink with the sudden conviction that she'd be stuck trying and failing to break up an argument.
Then Izuna sighed and admitted, "More or less."
"What," Tsukusa needled, still making a face like she was expecting a fight, "You'd rather have
miko?"
"Of course not," Izuna said. "
Miko have to stay virgins."
Tsukusa snickered, and then all three of them were laughing before Izuna continued. “But even thinking over things in retrospect, I don’t think she ever said anything about
worship. Versions of all the famous stories, and others about what he was like after they met, but nothing, well,
useful to figuring out what it means to be a god.”
“Well, that’s a dead end, then,” Yoko said, trying not to be too bitter and probably mostly failing. She sighed, then forced a smile onto her face. “So, seriously - what do you do for fun in Caviar Land?”
"Caviar is revolting,” Izuna said, making a face. “Actually, I tend to enjoy the same things as anyone else. I read comics, watch TV, go shopping, play console and computer games... Nothing strange or rarified."
"Oh yeah," Tsukusa asked, leaning forward and looking interested. "Which ones? What kind? Roleplaying, shooters, fighting games, MMOs...?"
"I like MMOs," Yoko said, "when I can afford them."
“I play Worlds Above, Worlds Below, myself,” Izuna said.
Tsukusa grinned. “Sweet. What server?”
“Aerie, for the most part.”
“Ditto,” Yoko said, raising her hand like she was in school.
“That makes three. I’ve got a pet-based build that’s pretty sweet, and I’ve been starting work on a real shoot-
all-the-things damage hose.”
Yoko giggled. “I’ve never been able to focus that much. The closest I’ve come is Sunsword, and she’s-”
Tsukusa groaned and facepalmed again, making Yoko blink at her worriedly. “What?”
“Princess?” the tough asked without lifting her head.
“Yes?” Izuna sounded like she had a pretty solid idea what was up, even though Yoko herself was clueless.
“Stormward?”
“Yes.”
Oh. So, if Tsukusa recognized both of their handles, then-
Tsukusa bolted out of her seat and started to pace. “Somebody’s totally fucking with us,” she said.
Izuna caught the eye of one of the nurses and nodded her over, and Yoko nibbled on her lip thoughtfully. “We
really need to talk to the rabbit,” she said.
* * * * * * *
The doctors had tried to explain just what the scanner bed they had the girls take turns with was and did, but Tsukusa’d tuned that bit out, too busy chewing on the deeply alarming idea that she’d been set up
months ago - or rather, that it had happened years before that.
That what had happened to her mother hadn’t been the stupid callous waste of reality or her own weakness, but someone else’s deliberate plan.
She didn’t like that thought. She didn’t like being the person she was when she thought it; too likely to make Kishi and the twins cry.
By the time all three of them had gone through the machine twice, once as magical girls and once as themselves, Yoko and Izuna were visibly antsy and Tsukusa herself was ready to start wrecking things out of sheer frustration.
When she saw that their next minder was military, she smiled. It looked like they’d be getting a chance to do just that.
During the car ride - they were in an armored limo, of all things - Tsukusa turned to their minder and said, “Hey, look, Sunshine, Princess, and I were talking...” and told him about their having met through gaming before, and the names they’d ‘chosen’ for their characters.
“...It makes sense for
her, since she said her mom always made jokes about her dad bein’ who he turns out ta be,” she finished, “but Sunshin an’ I never had a clue, and we
still got prime names that turn out to be ban on
and run into each other and hang out? Plus the way the crow and snake show up right on time?”
She shook her head. “That’s fishy.”
Their silver-haired handler considered what she’d told him, and nodded. “I’m told that the timing factor is something Intelligence is already focusing on...” he said in that smoker’s rasp of his. “They’ll probably have questions for you about it tomorrow.”
“Not this evening?” Yoko asked.
“This evening, all three of you have dinner meetings.”
Izuna leaned forward, making Tsukusa’s eyes flick aside to avoid her shirt’s neckline. “With whom?”
Tsukusa and the general shifted slightly to maintain their balance as the limo built up speed pulling onto the expressway, trying to drag them off of the rear-facing bench. “The Papal Nuncio has asked to meet with all three of you individually, and, for yourself and Satou-san, with your parents... Your own meeting is tonight.” His expression turned faintly uncomfortable. “Suzuki-san has been scheduled to meet with a private citizen named Yamaguchi Gorou, while Satou-san has been asked to attend upon the Imperial Household.”
There was a nervous, horribly cliche squeaking noise, and only after she saw Izuna raise a hand to cover her smile did Tsukusa realize that she and Yoko had hit exactly the same pitch at exactly the same moment.
“I can’t help with a legitimate businessman like Yamaguchi-san,” the politician’s daughter said, still visibly suppressing a smile, “but His Imperial Majesty is a perfectly nice old man.”
* * * * * * *
The ‘fire tests’, to the surprise of all three girls, took place under the eye and command of Yoko’s father, two them with him and the cameramen in a bunker while the third followed instructions through a radio headset. Tsukusa had been as puzzled by that as she had, until Yoko pointed out that they already knew that at least two of them could accidentally splash enough power and energy around to kill someone - or worse, in Yoko’s own case, condemn them to a horrible screaming death from radiation sickness.
Izuna couldn’t really blame her for being in favor of more safety, not when the girl had looked green enough that her usual reaction for wanting to take a pretty girl in her arms hadn’t perked itself back into her consciousness until
after her (cousin, dammit!) friend had started to cheer up.
Even her hormones, though, couldn’t tempt her into wanting to get in the middle of the vicious fight that was obviously building on the daughter’s side of that family. The father’s instructions all seemed to refer to games he had taught her when she was a child, and Yoko got tenser and tenser with every new exercise.
“It’s not just that she’s embarrassed, is it?” she murmured to Tsukusa in a quiet aside.
“You ever heard of any of these games, Princess? They’re magic exercises - and he taught ‘em to her without ever sayin’, I bet. She’s pissed about the mushroom routine.”
Kept in the dark and fed on bullshit. It made sense, and was obvious enough to make Izuna feel like an idiot for missing it.
Tsukusa grinned at her expression. “Don’t sweat it. Your mom’s job just teaches you the wrong sort of cynical.”
She wasn’t sure that cynical was the right term for it, but it was close enough that Izuna wasn’t inclined to quibble. “And Yoko, of course, simply isn’t, which is why she’s so hurt.”
“Probably,” Tsukusa agreed, and cocked an eyebrow at her. “You gonna meddle?”
“Not yet,” Izuna said. “Not until I’m sure what the best way would be.”
A few minutes later, Yoko came back into the bunker and stood in the ‘airlock’ while the technician in the lead-lined hazmat suit ran a Geiger counter’s wand up and down her body.
One of the uniformed technicians in the bunker - his name tag said ‘Yamanaka’ - made a note on his clipboard. “The target is going to be going in with spent
reactor fuel for disposal and she hasn’t taken a rad. Forget justice, where is
logic?” he muttered.
Yoko make a nauseated face again, so Izuna turned to Tsukusa and smirked. “Oh, by the way,” she said.
The dark-eyed girl gave her a wary look, probably detecting trouble from the note of amusement in her voice. “Yeah?”
“
You owe me lunch.”
For a moment, Tsukusa just stared at her cluelessly, before apparently remembering her promise to pay for the meal if the other two’s descriptions of themselves turned out to be accurate. She took a step back and gave her as blatant an elevator eye as she’d ever received in her life. For once, receiving it felt good - alarmingly good.
“Damn. Guess I do.” She glanced at Yoko, who was giving her father a chilly glare as he explained something to General Moto. “And Sunshine, too, come to that.”
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Glossary:
Notes of the Prime Ministry - Japan's system of government elects representatives for each district to the two houses of the National Diet, which selects a candidate to become the Prime Minister, the head of the executive branch, who is then formally appointed by the Emperor and retains the office until voted out by the lower house of the Diet, the House of Representatives. If Tanaka Himari were to be appointed to her office in our time line, she would be both the youngest (by one year) and the first female holder of the title; in the world of Mahou Shoujo Shinto Scion, she still holds both of these distinctions.
Tokushu Butai - Or, in English, Special Assault Teams. These are the Japanese version of the SWAT Team concept. Strictly speaking, all of them belong to the National Police Agency, which permanently assigns individual teams to work in the jurisdiction of particular municipal or prefectural police forces. Besides busting the heads that really need busted, the Tokyo team is also responsible for responding to threats to foreign embassies and for security at the Imperial Palace, Prime Minister's residence, and National Diet.
Kunai-cho - The branch of Japan's government known as the Imperial Household Agency is the only one that doesn't answer to the Prime Minister, and its remit covers the preservation and encouragement of traditional Japanese culture, the arrangement of state visits, the care and keeping of the official seals, and so on. With its tendency to try and retain customs otherwise outmoded in regard to the Imperial Family, as well as a history dating back to 701 CE, the Agency seemed the most likely place to find the very-traditionally trained 'Exorcism Division' responsible for suppressing hostile spirits and so on, although to the best of my knowledge no such group exists in the real world.
Miko - A 'shrine maiden', a virginal female attendant to a Shinto shrine who's responsible for specific sorts of ritual and practical cleansing and other rituals. Their classical dress is extremely distinctive, combining red
hakama (wide, pleated pants) with a white
haori (a traditional jacket or overcoat). Part of certain rituals of blessing involves an instrument called a
gohei, a straight wooden stick with two zig-zagging paper streamers on the 'business' end. Probably the most famous example of a shrine maiden to Western fans will be Sailor Moon's Hino Rei.
Nuncio - From the Latin
nuntius. A Papal Nuncio is the Holy See's version of an Ambassador.
Legitimate Businessman - To the best of my knowledge, Japanese organized crime does not use that particular coded phrase, but they tend to be more open about their existence and association with each other than their western counterparts. It would probably be known to anyone who was interested that the head of the largest
yakuza clan was, for instance, Yamaguchi Gorou, even if the Law Enforcement agencies responsible for catching him didn't feel they had sufficient evidence to force a conviction.
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
